Yoh, Swaziland is hot’ says The Soil’s Buhle Mda as she melts onto the main stage at MTN Bushfire festival. And it was. 25,000 people were gathered in Swaziland last weekend for the kingdom’s international music festival – not too shabby for a nation of under 1.5 million people. This is a festival which carries the overarching aim of “igniting a collective response for social change.” Black African music, cultures and languages are foregrounded. The voices singing in Zulu to The Soil on that Sunday (“it was a Sunday, ubuhle bakhe took my breath away”) far overpowered those joining in with The Parlotones and their default rock during the set before. A large portion of the line up consisted of Swazi musicians, and from the remainder, the appreciation shown for Swaziland and its people was overwhelming. Ntsika Ngxanga from The Soil echoed the sentiments of other South African artists when he stressed how important the refuge and solidarity from Swaziland was during Apartheid; comments which add weight when we consider the recent xenophobic attacks in South Africa.

It came as a great surprise, then, when the South African site, Times Live, tossed out this piece on the exclusion of Swazi people from the festival. The writer appears to have confused Bushfire with some other festival, probably in Switzerland. According to them, “Swaziland’s citizens stood sadly outside of the festival they hosted.” (Swazis going about their business on the road to Malkerns are transformed into Ntsika’s refugees, exiled from their motherland). The police and musicians were the only locals to receive free tickets to the festival. And the amount of Swazis on the line up was pitiful.

Meanwhile, in Swaziland, tickets sales within the kingdom far outnumbered those from other countries, and international ticket sales closed long before national ones in order to ensure that the bulk of tickets were sold locally. Educators, artists and entrepreneurs were amongst a multitude of locals who came to Bushfire free of charge. The kombis around Mbabane, eZulwini and Manzini have been abuzz with ‘Bushfyaah’ for weeks. Most importantly a third of the international line up is from the host-country, despite the fact that its music industry is extremely meager compared to the other countries that were represented. Bushfire is just as much about promoting Swaziland’s artists to an international audience as it is about showcasing international artists in Swaziland.

The fact is that we would have a hard time to find a festival that bridges the gap between the global and the local as well as Bushfire does. It is all too easy for major festivals to simply superimpose themselves onto their location, with hardly a glance to the people who occupy that space for the entire year. Yes, it’s impossible to avoid this completely –- even with the relatively low ticket prices, many Swazis cannot afford to dish out E600. But Bushfire does its best to compensate for this, with a series of outreach programmes that puts your average NGO to shame. There is the annual Arts Round Table discussion which sees 50 local artists and creative industry workers coming together to ‘increase knowledge sharing within the artistic community and equip individuals and organisations with skills to succeed as professionals within the creative sector’. This year there was a free performance at the nearby Mahlanya market by Tonik and Friends the day before the festival commenced. Since 2010, Bushfire Festival has been prefaced by the Schools Festival – an entire 3 days of creative workshops for 1000 Swazi high school students and their teachers by international facilitators such as Gcina Mhlope. The key goal of the Schools Festival is to expose Swazi students, who have no formal arts and culture curriculum in their public schools, to the arts. It is an invaluable event for Swaziland, one that recognizes art as a vital form of expression in the face of an education system which denies this. It ensures that there is a pool of educators and young people who are invested in the growth and spread of the arts in their kingdom. Ultimately, it wants to see a formal arts curriculum implemented in schools.

Then there is the creation of the Firefest Route, the archipelago of allied festivals across Southern Africa, which allows musicians to receive exposure in multiple countries, and facilitates pan-African collaborations. For 2015, the offspring of this festival circuit include Swaziland’s Afro-soul singer Floewe’s performance at Azgo festival in Mozambique, and Bholoja’s collaboration with Bongeziwe Mabandla on Bushfire’s Main stage. Bushfire is first and foremost a platform for African musicians to gather from and share with each other. It comes as no coincidence that Swaziland, is the country to host this beacon of inclusivity and diversity.